


These Wondrous Things

by Lady_Vibeke



Series: Cara Dune & Din Djarin: Tales of Two Space Idiots in Love [36]
Category: The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Adults Trying to Adult, Aliit ori'shya tal'din, Caretaking, Conflict Resolution, Emotional Constipation, F/M, Idiots in Love, Love Confessions, Mandalorian Culture, Minor Injuries, Mutual Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-22
Updated: 2020-10-22
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:01:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27150809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lady_Vibeke/pseuds/Lady_Vibeke
Summary: “You still won't look at me.”He curses to himself. He didn't mean to sound so hurt.“What?” Cara has the nerve to ask, like she genuinely has no idea what he's talking about.“It's been three days,” he murmurs, his attention focused on her ankle as his fingers move and rub and soothe under the child's curious supervision. “I've come to terms with this,” he sighs. “Why haven't you?”He doesn't want to force her, but he believes he deserves to know if he has no way to make up for this. He knew Cara wouldn't accept this easily, he knew that even before fate put him in front of a life or death decision, and it was a surprisingly simple choice. Trouble is he fears she probably expected him toaskfor her permission before he gave up his helmet to save her life.ORIn which Din puts Cara's life before his Creed.In which Din is a self-sacrificing softie and Cara is mad.In which Cara tells Din he loves her. Wait,what?
Relationships: Baby Yoda (The Mandalorian TV) & Din Djarin & Cara Dune, Din Djarin/Cara Dune
Series: Cara Dune & Din Djarin: Tales of Two Space Idiots in Love [36]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1709416
Comments: 22
Kudos: 167





	These Wondrous Things

**Author's Note:**

> I'm crawling out of my gloomy burrow and writing this helped a lot. It's a mess of a story because for the first time I mashed both Din's and Cara's POVs together and it turned out as a big, fucked up shake of thoughts and feelings. Good luck keeping tabs with our pining idiots. 😂

She barely talks to him the first twenty four hours following the unspeakable happening. She can hardly be in the same room with him, which is quite a big deal in a small ship like the Razor Crest.

On day two, the melancholy she feels seeping through the forced silence between them, instead of subsiding, starts nibbling at her conscience and slowly she starts interacting with him again, though she makes sure he gets she doesn't feel comfortable around him as she used to. She kind of wishes he would put the damn thing on for her own comfort, but he seems to see little sense in that, after what happened. The kid seems fine with the new state of things, as well, so that leaves only Cara feeling unpleasantly uncomfortable—which is understandable, since all of this happened because of her.

On day three, her stubborn determination not to burden him any further with her weakness turns against her and a misstep on the ice almost costs her her life for the second time within thirty hours. This time, however, there is no need for dramatic and heroic gestures and no frantic reanimation is required to bring her heart back to life: Din catches her right before she slips into a bottomless crack in the glacier floor, but her foot twists at a weird angle and all she feels as she collapses against the frozen beskar shell of Din's breastplate is sheer, blinding pain.

The hunt goes down the drain. Din refuses to pursue their target on his own and leave Cara behind in the blizzard with an injured ankle, so the moron drapes her arm across his shoulders a straight up drags her all the five miles back to the ship, unbothered by the string of imprecations she grumbles along the way. She feels humiliated and embarrassed for ruining the day twice in a week. She's more of a burden than an asset, at this point. Din might as well drop her off in the nearest civilised planet and carry on by himself. She wouldn't even blame him.

He doesn't.

Back on the old Crest, he helps her crawl out of her frosted clothes, then gets rid of his own armour and leaves it in a corner to thaw, helmet on top. He takes a moment to look at it like his whole head came off with it: it still feels strange to be without it in someone else's presence but it's not as strange as he believed it would be. He feels at ease, bared before Cara and the kid, and though it was a forced decision to reveal his face to them he doesn't regret it, which is a surprise even to himself. When Cara's heart had stopped beating after that electric shock three days ago, it was only natural for him to slip his helmet off and breathe life back into her. Their prisoner was dead, anyway, so there was no other witness. He's carrying on just fine. It's Cara who can't seem to recover from the shock of opening her eyes not to her usual Mandalorian but to the very naked, very human face of Din Djarin.

She has the piercing warmth of his eyes seared in her mind and, if she was brave enough to admit it, deep into her soul. She's been fighting to forget them and forget the charming, imperfect features she hadn't been able to look away from—the crooked nose, the asymmetrical shape of the crescents of his eyes pointing downward at the corners, the softness of his bottom lip and the spare hair dusting his jaw...

Her stomach clenches every time she thinks about that face trying _not_ to think about it. She can't stop reminding herself she was never meant to see that at all, any of it. She wasn't meant to find out how much she loves that face.

Din helps her move up the lower deck toward the sleeping quarters, where it's warmer and he can take a better look at her more comfortably. He leaves her sitting on the cot they've settled as her bed, then goes to get the kid out of his sleeping compartment, finding him lying on his back with the wooden toys Cara carved for him floating in circle above his head. The toys fall as soon as the kid notices Din's presence and immediately reaches out with his arms to be picked up.

“Are you happy we're back early?” Din asks softly. The child's hands are all over his face; unlike Cara, he's always happy when the helmet comes off.

Cara is wiggling out of her leggings when Din gets back to her. He casts her a scolding glare she can't see because she's refusing to lift her eyes from the floor, as she's been doing for the past three days. Din lets her struggle because he's not sure she would appreciate the implicit insinuation she can't undress on her own. There's a limited amount of help Cara Dune is willing to accept and Din is afraid they reached capacity three days ago already. He'll be lucky if she lets him take care of her ankle.

“Take him,” he says as he deposits the kid on her lap. Cara says nothing. Every fibre in her body is tense, not because of her injury—she's barely aware of that—but because she can't understand how Din can play it so cool, fussing around her with his face obnoxiously uncovered, like he wants to remind her his little stunt a few days ago changed everything for good. She used to watch him go to sleep with that damn helmet; now as soon as the ramp closes behind them and they're safely locked in the ship, he gets rid of it like he's been waiting to do that all day.

Din kneels in front of her, takes her left foot in his hand and carefully peels the heavy sock away. His hands are cold, but it's good. He prods into her skin, which is already starting to show some bruising, and checks the bones, then the joint. It flexes quite effortlessly, even if it makes Cara hiss a couple of times.

“It's sprained,” he determines with a sigh. Cara sighs, too. This sucks: like she didn't owe him enough already.

“It's fine,” she mutters. “Just wrap it up.”

“It needs ice and a massage to prevent any swelling.”

“Okay, I'll—”

“You stay here,” he snaps, pushing her back down on the cot when she tries to stand. He rises to his feet and points a finger at the kid, “Keep an eye on her. Make sure she doesn't move.”

The child tips his head back with an enthusiastic giggle that sounds too much like an affirmation. The little shit is smart, when he wants to be: he wiggles around on Cara's knees and points his big eyes at her with so much determination she actually finds it impossible to move.

 _Good one, Mando,_ she chuckles.

Din comes back with the med-kit.

“Was he a good guardian?” he asks as he kneels back at Cara's feet. He's almost tempted to slip his helmet back on, just so she can stop looking anywhere but at him.

“He's been staring at me like this since you left,” Cara says, still engaged in the peculiar staring contest.

Din pats the child's head proudly. “Good job, kid. Tell me if I'm hurting you,” he adds as he starts kneading Cara's ankle with an oil he's warmed up between his hands.

She smirks. “You think my pain tolerance is that low?”

“I just don't want to cause you unnecessary pain.”

She's not looking at him but she can still see it—all of it, like a synaesthetic joke—the softness of his expression while he scrutinises her, the lines of concern across his forehead, and _damn him,_ damn this man and the things he does to her.

“You're not,” she whispers, her voice like an impalpable caress upon his cheek. He wants— _needs_ to see her eyes, what she's trying to hide in them. He's not sure he can live like this for much longer, someone has to acknowledge the bantha in the room.

“You still won't look at me.”

He curses to himself. He didn't mean to sound so hurt.

“What?” Cara has the nerve to ask, like she genuinely has no idea what he's talking about.

“It's been three days,” he murmurs, his attention focused on her ankle as his fingers move and rub and soothe under the child's curious supervision. “I've come to terms with this,” he sighs. “Why haven't you?”

He doesn't want to force her, but he believes he deserves to know if he has no way to make up for this. He knew Cara wouldn't accept this easily, he knew that even before fate put him in front of a life or death decision, and it was a surprisingly simple choice. Trouble is he fears she probably expected him to _ask_ for her permission before he gave up his helmet to save her life.

And Cara did, in a way. She remembers what he told her on Sorgan: no Mandalorian can be seen without his helmet and put it on again. And yet here he is, calm and nonchalant, slipping his bucket on every darn morning before leaving the ship like nothing happened. Cara is positive there is something she is failing to understand in this whole situation, but she is still too mad at him to demand an explanation.

She pets the child's ears, lost in a maze of thoughts that always seems to lead her to the same dead end: Din is okay with all this fucked up shit.

“I don't know,” she mumbles after a pause so long Din must have forgotten what the question was. “It just feels... wrong.”

An amused smile stretches the corners of Din's mouth upward. _Wrong,_ she says.

“You're half naked in front of me and you think seeing _my face_ is wrong?”

She scoffs, “I don't have a creed forbidding me to show my graces to people. That would be an utter shame.”

The grin in her voice is palpable and such a relief to Dim. He grins, too.

“Can't argue that.”

He tries to picture her in a Mandalorian armour and immediately regrets it: it ignites a heat in his loins that spreads throughout his body before he can erase the image from his head. Instinctively, his hand ghosts up the curve of her calf to rest on the back of her knee. He's still massaging her ankle with his other hand, but his touch has lost its initial purpose and has become a mere and quite pointless stroke.

Suddenly, in the wistfulness of the silence, he hears himself say, “If I could go back, I'd do it again.”

He kind of expected Cara to bark back something harsh like she's been doing the past few days; instead she just mutters, “I wasn't worth it.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Din sees her arms fold around the child and tucks him closer to herself. She believes this—she believes his Creed was more important than her life.

“That was up to me to determine,” he stresses as tactfully as he can. “I wish you could accept my decision.”

Cara takes the it like she takes any other blow: unflinchingly, gulping down the pain to keep her guard up.

“You traded everything you believed in for my life, that's not—”

“Your life is more important to me than my beliefs,” he states, pressing his thumb into the hollow behind her ankle. She winces. “Does it hurt?”

“Yes.” Cara exhales a sharp breath. “And I'm not talking about my ankle.”

They're stalling: she cares about him more than she cares about herself, and he cares about her more than he cares about himself. They need to drop the recriminations and find a compromise before they drive each other crazy with this stubborn cold war. He reckons he should explain why he did that—why he really did that. He just doesn't know how to say it.

“Cara, look at me,” he begs. He can't do this if she keeps running from him. He needs her eyes, with their light and their darkness, to give him the strength to get it all out. If after this she strill wants to be mad at him, be it.

“Look at me, please.”

His fingers squeeze her in a gentle prayer. Cara bites her lip, swallows.

“I can't.”

“It's not the end of the world,” he promises. “A lot of my perspectives changed since meeting you and this little guy. My priorities changed. I'd lie if I said I had never considered—” He trails off, sighs, starts over. “I was starting to feel trapped beneath the helmet. You just gave me an excuse to do what I was already thinking about.”

Cara can't see where this is supposed to be going. If he's just trying to take some guilt off her shoulders, it's not working.

“ _Why?”_ she grits through her teeth with a rage that startles the kid. “Why would you even—”

Din's shoulders sag like she just insulted him. It's even more confusing to Cara, who's fixing the top of his bowed head with a sense of desperate dismay mixed with worry. Din glances up at her with a smile so blue and broken that she forgets to make herself look away.

“I thought you would have figured it out by now,” he says. “I guess you're not as clever as you sell yourself.”

The flirtatious tone cannot fully conceal a shade of disappointment. Cara nudges his side with her good foot to try to break the tension.

“You're such a smartass!”

Din doesn't laugh. He's pensive and quiet, even more than his usual.

He focuses back on her ankle: the peppermint ointment he's been rubbing into it has been completely absorbed and the swelling has improved. He wraps it up in a clean gauze he takes way longer than necessary to place. He's stuck on his own doubts: from here, he can either make a step forward or ruin everything.

“We can't prevent the bruising but if you avoid walking on it, you'll be as good as new in less than a week,” he says. He's absently swiping his thumb back and forth on her bare skin above the bandage; his other hand is still curled behind her knee.

The abrupt change of subject is suspicious. Cara frowns: now he's the one who won't look at her.

“Thanks,” she mumbles, perplexed. “Still not talking about my ankle. Well, not just it, I guess.”

He feels her muscles twitch under his fingertips. She has goosebumps all over her leg.

“Are you cold?”

“No.”

“You're shivering.”

“That's not cold, you idiot,” she half laughs. There's a brief pause, then she adds, “You're touching one of the most sensitive spots in my body.”

“Sorry.” Din releases her before his brain processes how soft and husky her voice was. She chuckles at his hasty reaction.

“It wasn't a complaint, you know?”

She takes pity on his uneasiness, especially since it's utterly unnecessary. She could stay here the whole day, enjoying his attention and listening to his unmodulated voice talk about stuff she's hardly following. It's like losing his helmet allowed him to lose other, deeper restraints, and the man before her right now is a whole new one—a bolder one. A wave of fondness floods her chest.

Din feels a sudden warmth on his face. It takes him a couple of seconds to realise it's Cara's hand, cupping his cheek in a tentative caress. Her thumb traces his cheekbone a few times, causing a shiver down his spine. It feels good and addictive; a little whisper inside his head tells him any sane man out there would throw his honour out of the window in a blink for this. If she can make him feel like this with just one touch, what else could she do?

Then a gentle tug urges him to look up, and his heart stops.

He thinks he's never going to take this for granted—the luxury of being able to look straight into Cara's eyes without artificial filters depriving them of their natural light. The first time he looked at her without his helmet, a breathless smile pulled at his lips before he could even try to stop it. Cara never saw it because her eyes had darted away the very moment they met his; the smile was there, though, and it keeps coming back whenever their gazes meet accidentally in occasions that used to be impossible—a shared meal, their routine armour check before a job, playing with the kid before bed... He keeps drinking her in as if he was afraid someone might put his visor back between him and her any moment and take this pleasure away.

She's scrutinising him in a way that makes the hair on the nape of his neck rise, and she's smiling, one of those smiles that brings out the dimples in her cheeks and steals Din's breath away.

“For the record, I'm still mad at you,” she conveys, “and I'm honestly quite pissed that you were so handsome all along under that thing and never mentioned it _once.”_

“You don't look nor sound pissed.”

Cara's hand brushes past his ear around his head. “It's those brown eyes, damn you. Stop looking at me like that.”

“How am I looking at you?” he asks absently, lost in her eyes.

She gives him a mischievous smirk. “In a way that would make me drop my pants, if I was wearing any.”

Din chokes out a laugh. This is what he wants: her trademark impudence, the light-hearted banter.

“You finally sound like yourself again.” He dares a hopeful grin. “Are we okay?”

“We will be after I put a black eye on that annoyingly pretty face.”

And he knows it's self-destructing of him to ask this, but he needs to know, “You really don't know why I did what I did?”

“You did it because you're an idiot.” Cara rolls her eyes. “Come on, help me up.”

She hands him the kid, then lets him wrap an arm around her waist and hooks her own arm around his neck while he pulls her up. It takes her a moment to balance her weight on the good foot; Din lets her lean onto him, holds her close for no real reason, but she lets him, so he must be doing something right.

He can't decide if she's only playing dumb or she seriously doesn't get his reasons. He places his hands on her hips—to help her keep her balances, he tells himself—and pulls back slightly to be able to look her in the eye.

“You should know... we're allowed to uncover our faces in front of our closest family.”

“Yeah, except we're not—”

“We don't share blood ties or... _official_ ties,” he corrects, “but you're still family to me.”

“Is that so?”

He doesn't like the way her brows arch. Is she surprised? Shocked?

“It's not the same for you?”

He can't keep a lilt of hurt from his voice, and it gets through to Cara, who tenses under his palms, and he thinks this is it. He ruined everything.

Cara is still for long, torturing seconds. She can't bear to look at him, not now that she's sensing this sudden fragility in him. In this whole mess, she couldn't see past her anger and didn't even stop for one moment to wonder if his motivation could be deeper and way more justified than she assumed. Because what he did for her wasn't something one just did on impulse, not without deeper motives. She imagines switching their roles in this insane scenario and asks herself if she would be willing to throw her whole life out of the window for him, and she has to admit to herself she _would_ for reasons much shallower than saving his life. If he feels the same way she does... well, that explains so much. It explains everything, in fact.

She breaks into a slow smile of realisation, and Din watches in a state of confusion that's paralysing him on the spot, hands still tight on her arms. He doesn't know why she's smiling all of a sudden; she was ready to punch the soul out of him just a moment ago, and now she's wearing this smile that is almost shy, and he can't fathom what caused this but he's fairly sure he could spend the rest of his life admiring this smile.

It takes her a while, but finally Cara gazes up at him with a knot of raw fondness crushing her heart ever so sweetly. She knows what he's trying to tell her, now: she can read it beneath every tentative word, through the layer on uncertainty that is making his tone quiver. She feels stupid for not seeing this sooner. It was all there, way before the helmet thing; she was just too busy battling with her own feelings to notice. This fierce protective instinct they have toward one another is going to be a serious problem, sooner or later.

They're _so_ bad at this. Neither of them is any good with words when it really matters, but she's confident they can do better with a bit of practice and a lot of clumsy mistakes. Actually, she can't wait to find out how bad they can get before they truly learn to communicate like average adults. So she takes his hands into hers and squeezes reassuringly to placate his nervousness, the lingering numbness in their fingers making it difficult and tricky in a stupidly amusing way. Her eyes crinkle as she smiles brighter and tentatively, breathlessly whispers with a warm throb in her heart, “You love me.”

She nearly makes herself giggle, her own disbelief fighting with a surge of pride that manifests in a flare of heat across her cheeks. She's going to remember this—blushing like a little girl before the man who laid all of himself at her feet and got a temper tantrum in return. How could she _know?_ Why didn't this idiot say something sooner instead of taking her insults for three whole days?

Din stares, immobile. He's dumbfounded. _She knows, then,_ he thinks, half amazed and half terrified. It feels like an epiphany to himself, who knew all along how he felt for her and yet finds those three little words so stunning and mind-blowing. _I love her,_ he grins to himself, and he's probably making a fool of himself, right now, but he can't bring himself to care.

He could just say yes. He could just nod, and she would have her answer loud and clear. He decides to spell it out for her, instead, word by word, even though she apparently already knows, just so she can hear it.

“I love you.”

Cara's forehead leans against his and suddenly he's surrounded by her—warmth and scent and strength—and the kid, sandwiched between them, gurgles happily watching their noses bump together.

Din ducks his head and laughs under his breath, wondering if he's coming across as foolish as he feels.

“This is awkward, I'm sorry,” he babbles. “I've never said this before, to anyone. I—”

Cara's hand clasps over his mouth to silence whatever nonsense he was going to utter.

“Din,” she almost snorts in her attempt to suppress a laugh, “if you're done rambling, I'm kinda trying to kiss you.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah,” Cara grins as her hand lowers to grab his shirt. “Don't drop the kid,” she recommends, then pulls him down against her lips.

He tastes the sweetness of the liquor he made her drink to keep her warm while they limped back to the ship. Her lips are soft and hot and seek his with a feverish eagerness he's too stunned to reciprocate. He hasn't kissed anyone in years, but he doesn't remember ever experiencing this inebriating electricity before. When he finally finds the courage to kiss her back, he feels her smile into the kiss; she wraps her arm around his neck and drags him closer, seeking a better angle to deepen the kiss, which he gladly provides. He's smiling, too, he joy blossoming in his chest bubbling up into a laughter that ends up infecting Cara, and then the kid. They only remember the rest of the universe exists when they break apart, flushed and panting, and even then the universe doesn't seem so important, all in all.

Cara's hands settle at the sides of his neck. Her lips are red and wet, her eyes glossy from an emotion that echoes inside Din and finally gives a meaning to these few days of tension. This was so simple and somehow their sentimental ineptitude managed to turn all of this into a complicated disaster.

Cara takes her time to observe him, to trail her fingers over the stubble along his jawline. She feels so happy just to be doing this she can barely remember how to breathe.

“This is gonna take some getting used to,” she says in a contemplative murmur.

“You mean my face?” Din asks, a bit self-consciously. He doesn't really know what to think of his own appearance but, if the way Cara's looking at him is any indication, there must be something worth looking at in him.

Cara shakes her head. “I mean everything.” She raises a hand, outlines the contours of his mouth with her fingers. “Has anyone ever told you you have beautiful lips?”

It's his turn to shake his head. “No one has seen my lips since I was a young boy.”

“Such a pity.”

She kisses him again, just a quick, tender peck, then lets her forehead rest back upon his again.

“Yeah, I think it's gonna be good,” she muses.

Din tips his head to one side. “What?”

 _Don't ask stupid questions, man,_ she thinks, but answers him anyway.

“Waking up to this face every morning.”

The mere thought of what this single line implies makes Din blush, but with a funny sense of elation. Waking up to _her_ face every morning sounds like a good plan for the future. It also means waking up with _all of her_ —her cheek on his chest, her arms around his waist, his hands splayed on her back... It's so easy to picture it already feels real, more like a memory than a fantasy.

And Cara glances down, meeting the kid's vigilant stare. He seems very interested in what is going on, even quite pleased about it.

“We like this mug, don't we, kid?” she winks. The child speaks out a delighted sound that says more than a thousand words.

“Are you still angry with me?” Din inquires shyly. He can't expect to fix everything with a kiss, even though he's quite certain they just fixed _most_ of the last few days' ordeal; he just wants to make sure Cara doesn't still want to kill him in his sleep.

For some reason he's anything but surprised by her cheeky answer.

“Yes,” she says resolutely, the impish twinkle in her eyes betraying her mirth. She bites her lower lip with a forgiving shrug. “But we can talk about it later, or in a few years. It doesn't seem so important all of a sudden,” she chuckles. “Go figure.”

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like I owe everyone a big, fat, bone-crushing hug for all the support you gave me in these last few, horrible days. You guys make my infinte love for writing and for these two fools even more heart-warming. 🥺 Season 2 is almost here, I can barely keep myself together. Who's excited? 😍


End file.
